Faith, Hope, Charity, and Pain Rev. William E. Stempsey, SJ, MD, PhD, Jesuit priest, Professor of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School

The history of pain is characterized by competing explanations with competing purposes. Over time, religious, social and physiological viewpoints became intertwined and inseparable. By the Middle Ages, the experience of pain, for Christians, and particularly Roman Catholics, was focused on identification with the suffering of Christ on the Cross. During the Renaissance, penances involving self-infliction of pain became common. Cartesian mechanism led to more sophisticated physiological research and pain began to be seen as a warning sign of underlying physiological dysfunction, transforming pain itself into something valuable. Pain acquired prognostic importance and was not necessarily something to be treated. Physicians also tended to see pain as a positive element of the healing associated with early surgery and other medical treatments. Protestant instance on the priority of Sacred Scripture stressed pain, particularly that associated with human labor and childbirth, as punishment for original sin. Study of pain was fragmented, even into the 1950s, with physicians, physiologists, theologians and philosophers focused on their own particular interests. Contemporary approaches to pain tend to be multidisciplinary, involving an array of health professionals, and using drugs, nerve blocks, acupuncture, physical, behavioral, and massage therapy, and more. Focus is on pain relief but also on helping people to live with chronic pain.

The religious response to pain today is too often reduced to antiquated platitudes about “offering up” pain. The role of the theological virtues in pain management has been largely overlooked. I here argue that the virtues have an important role to play for patients coping with pain and for health care professionals. Faith, for the Christian, can set pain in the context of a larger worldview in which pain, suffering and death do not have the last word, but are ultimately conquered through the suffering and death of Christ. But even non-religious people can recognize a sort of faith that situates pain and suffering in a larger transcendent context and offers deeper meaning. This can occur even when cure or pain relief is unlikely or impossible, and it is particularly important there. Hope is what prevents despair about pain and suffering. It involves much more than a simple desire for relief of pain. Hope involves a complex desire for healing in the fullest sense, and truly human healing involves more than physical cure. It involves the deepest elements of the human spirit. Human life, death, and suffering bring us headlong into mystery. This is true for believer and non-believer alike. Charity is oriented more toward those who care for people in pain. It considers not simply actions, but actions motivated by the virtue: what is done, how and to whom it is done, and with what motivation it is done. Charity recognizes the inherent value of every human being qua human. It embraces self-sacrifice in charitable giving. Charity gives priority to agapeic action over mere justice or any business model; it recognizes, more overtly than the other virtues, the essential communal nature of charitable care for those in pain.